Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [388]
No less explicit, William H. Grey, the leading force of the Arkansas freedmen’s convention, excoriated the “bastard republic” which had been established in the South, with slavery as its cornerstone, and revealed how his people had “thrown off the mask” and had provided the necessary force to break the back of the rebellion and save the Union. At first, he conceded, the mighty and educated northern Saxon had evinced little sympathy for the slave. But the American people suddenly awoke in 1862 to find him less of a fool than they had imagined. Beneath an exterior and “seeming respect” made up of endless chants of “yes, sir, massa” and “no, sir, massa,” they discovered “a human soul, with a will and a purpose of its own.” And Grey suggested that this discovery would have profound meaning for the nation. “We have now thrown off the mask, hereafter to do our own talking, and to use all legitimate means to get and to enjoy our political privileges. We don’t want anybody to swear for us or to vote for us; we want to exercise those privileges for ourselves.” The “peace and quiet” of Arkansas, he warned, depended on it.27
No matter how warmly they dwelled on the mutual affections and shared experiences of blacks and whites, no matter how genuine the professions of loyalty and the recitals of wartime faithfulness, none of the many postwar black meetings and conventions expressed the slightest tinge of nostalgia for the old days of slavery. That experience, as they viewed it, had been brutalizing and degrading. Although they might sympathize with the plight of former masters and mistresses and with the losses their “white folks” had sustained on the battlefield, such solicitude did not embrace the Confederate war effort or the “peculiar institution.” In their overly conciliatory Address to the Constitutional Convention, North Carolina freedmen acknowledged an intimacy with whites “unknown to any other state of society” and “attachments for the white race which must be as enduring as life.” But that same Address talked of having emerged from a bondage under which their race had “groaned” for 250 years and suffered indescribable “degradation.” Even as the Kentucky Colored People’s Convention acknowledged some former slaveholders as their “best friends,” the view of bondage they incorporated in their Declaration of Sentiment was uncompromising: “that cursed system under which we so long groaned, which crushed every aspiration; debased us to the level with the beasts of the field; robbed us of every attribute of humanity, and prostituted our wives, our sisters, and daughters.” Nor did the Virginia convention, although denying any ill will toward their former owners, hesitate to write into the Declaration of Rights and Wrongs an assessment of the “peculiar institution” as scathing as any prewar abolitionist might have conceived:
We have been compelled, under pain of death, to submit to injuries deeper and darker than the earth ever witnessed in the case of any other people. We have been forced to silence and inaction; to look on the infernal spectacle of our sons groaning under the lash; our daughters ravished; our wives violated, and our firesides desolated, while we ourselves have been led to the shambles, and sold like beasts of the field.
When that same convention debated the wording of its Appeal to the American People, a delegate moved that the phrase “we feel no ill-will or prejudice towards our former masters” be amended by striking out “our former masters” and